Challenge: A Halo/Banner of Stars crossover

Since I can't find much mention about Earth other than it name being mentioned a few times a drink toast to Earth. So it sounds a bit like Earth's a distant legend.

Well here's the thought why not sometime during the war between the Abh and the Four Nations Alliance of humankind. Then due to unforeseen events on a far boarder between the two powers a UNSC ship shows up and starts scans and leaves. The few ships in the area of both sides start going in an up roar with the unknown ship showing up in areas so far away from the fighting and leaving quickly.

Then later some events can follow and the UNSC soon finds itself at war with both the Abh and the Four Nations Alliance of humankind.

The UNSC may not has as large fleets as both Abh and the Alliance but the UNSC's ships have many advantages. Like the fact they use space FTL that doesn't involve plainspace. That means their ships can go from one place to another without anyone noticing and can be surprised attacked at any time. (the reverse is somewhat true though but with the UNSC only using Real space it forces both sides to fight in real space more than they normally do) The UNSC also has a massive range advantage. The MAC guns coupled with AI targeting can seriously take out ships. In fact looking at the armament level of them and the fact the Abh consider nuclear weapons to be primitive....well I wonder if they would change their tune after being on the receiving end of a Shiva.

It's odd that the Abh seem to have this personality that their technology and computer systems are perfect or something (no manual checking even UNSC ships have that and they have AI's).

Another large advantage is either side has anything like space fighters. The UNSC can cause massive damage to the enemy with their unique fighter support, cover, and attacks.

the unsc would probably hammer them both, most combat in banner happens with mines thrown through their ftl portal things, the unsc could just play sniper and then dissapear when the abh or allied nations approach, also i think earth was cut off from plainspace in some war or something so the unsc is basically unasailable. been years since i seen it so in not sure

ps: DEATH TO SPACE ELVES!!!!

wouldnt mind the imperials from legend of the galactic heros have a go at the abh

Well the Abh could simply drown the UNSC in bodies. IIRC They were turning out full battle-fleets every couple of weeks. It would probably go the same way the Covenant war went Abh/ Alliance wining in space but losing ground battles. If they even bother to fight instead of blasting the spaceports and quarantining them.

How durable are Ahb ships? The Covenant didn't just drown the UNSC in boides after all.
It took three high powered MAC rounds, or a high yield nuke( Which they had sparingly few.) to kill smaller Covenant ship. And that of course was assuming there was a ship to fire a shot Covenant ships could mission kill or out right destroy their UNSC counter parts with one shot, which brings up anther question. What kind of fire power do Ahb, and Alliance have?

I don't know Halo at all, so I can't offer comparisons, but the Abh and Four Nations Alliance use the following weapons:

Mines. These are long-range, autonomous anti-matter warheads with plane-space generators (not plain space). The anti-matter serves to power the plane-space generator and act as the warhead. Both sides have rather heavy-duty point-defense systems, so these mines are quite maneuverable, and other tricks show up depending when in the time-line you're talking about. These are, by far, the main weaponry of the systems.

Railgun launched fusion missiles. Mainly used by what the official translation calls Patrol ships (IIRC), these are basically seeking fusion missiles launched from electromagnetic cannon.

Anti-proton cannon. Used as the primary weapon on the smallest class of military vessel. Also used as point-defense on larger vessels.

Lasers. Used for point defense.

They do have some kind of shielding that can at least attenuate laser and anti-proton cannon fire. Whatever it is, it isn't enough to do anything significant to the mines or fusion missiles, which have to be destroyed with active point-defense.

I should also add that the Abh ships are optimized for plane-space dominance, not real-space dominance. There's some unusual properties of plane-space physics they take advantage of. Primarily that the max speed of a ship in plane-space is related to the amount of mass in the real-space bubble (the more mass, the lower the max speed). Abh ships tend to be smaller than the equivalent ship of a non-Abh fleet to give them a speed advantage.

We don't get much in the way of real-space combat, so it's hard to judge what kind of ranges they have.

Also wasn't the Ahb created to be slave and also the isn't the four nation goal to return them a slave state or destroy them.

I could see the UNSC leaving them alone has long has they don't intrude into their space voluntary because of those reasons and that if it set after the halo series they would want time to lick their wounds before entering in a new conflict..

First I haven't been on this forum in a while so I don't know all the rules yet I thought their wasn't one against posting a challange here...I thought I already read all the rules maybe I missed but but I'm not sure.

Well a war would likely happen after the UNSC/Covenant if one of those races actually attacked the UNSC. Even though it's likely the SOL system and probably some surrounding systems are closed off of Nulspace The UNSC can't risk loosing any of it's surviving colonies now because their likely trying to rebuild and recover. They need what ever they can get.

The Elites will likely help (likely out of guilt, and feeling they owe the humans a large dept).

Also I noticed that Abh ships seem to lack a design for repulsing boarding parties or similar situations. If the UNSC used their Longswords or Pelicans to board Abh capital ships they can cause a lot of damage inside. Not to mention the Abh lack of ground war fare they likely don't have much in the way of manine training and thus not well equipped to repeal boarding parties. (also the lack of gravity during space combat is another down side the fact the UNSC has active Gravity all the time is something the Abh would be shocked over)

Another thing is that the UNSC could drop teams of combat forces on allied Abh worlds to cause trouble or even destroy as much of the enemy infrastructure as possible. since the Abh doesn't have anything to help the ALlied world if they receive enough damage may drop out of their alliance because their supplying the Abh so much but their not protecting them from the enemy ground forces that already infiltrated their world even though the Abh likely agreed to protect them.

You know the fact that Earth's forces showing up again would likely cause a ton of political and social talking and other things due to the fact that their homeworld returned. (also even if the UNSC is so dwindled they can still cause massive problems with the Abh and alliance.

And also before the Covenant/UNSC war the UNSC has a large number of ships and worlds under it's control. it should be able to handle both sides if it happened before the war.

The Abh certainly aren't set up to repel boarders. Since their primary weapons are the mines, they really don't go in for much in the way of close-combat in real-space, except for one specific class of ship (that's really meant primarily to be able to catch up to and slow down ships in plane space so larger ships can catch up and deal out the damage). They also don't seem to really care for the idea. It wouldn't be surprising if they simply didn't think enemy ships being worth the bother to capture, since they have different design priorities and would never be salvaged for Star Forces use. However, unless they've got a massive speed and armor advantage, "boarding parties" isn't likely to be something that happens very often.

They aren't completely ignorant of ground warfare, and they do have a specialized ground warfare unit (exact size is indeterminate, it never really comes up in much detail in the novels beyond that it does exist). However, the Abh really don't mess around with the governing structures on the surface of most of the planets in their system. They've got their own ground forces. The only thing they're forbidden from doing is space travel. How well trained and equipped these are will vary wildly, and we never really get a feel for what is typical.

The Abh would not be surprised by artificial gravity, since they have it and use it in pretty much every ship and station.

I don't think you really understand the Abh political structure, though. They are rather idiosyncratic. But the Abh don't really have "allies". There's the Abh Empire, their enemies, and neutrals. They just don't do the alliance thing beyond trading partners. The Abh Empire follows a rather strict neutrality tradition, and will not go to war unless attacked (which does complicate the original scenario a bit).
Planets under their control are Abh territory. But they're a lot more interested in the space lanes than the planets themselves. With a few exceptions, it's going to be up to the planetary governments to deal with any kind of ground invasion or land-based infrastructure damage. Everything the Abh cares about will be in space - even their capital city is a space station. Most Abh literally never step foot on planet their entire lives. And without any space-ships of their own, any planet captured by the UNSC is going to need a lot of work to be much help to them.

Ok you have some good points (I don't now muc about their political structure) but even if they have that strict policy of that. If a UNSC get's caught in a cross fire between Abh forces and Alliance it's very likely the UNSC ship will fire on both to keep itself save and give it enough time to get away. Like a large misunderstanding due to the Abh's ignorance especially over everyone's ignorance about the UNSC/Covenant war. The UNSC could also not know anything about the Abh. They could have been but off before the Abh started.

Also wouldn't the fact the UNSC can Alien alies and enemies also be a real shocker. Especially that since they have no nulspace...then it would likely suprise them that Earth still managed to get such wide spread territory and even found something they never did...aliens.

I also want to point out that the Covenant used boarding parties several times to gather intel, capture ships and other things. My best bet that at one point during the UNSC/Covenant war it likely happened a lot so they Covenant could try to find UNSC holdings.

I also want to say that even though those mines are long range weapons their nothing like Archer missles. I found what their armed with and an archer missile travels faster and pack's a much bigger punch than any Abh mines.

Also does anyone have an opinion about how effective carriers would be against Abh forces since the Abh lack's space fighters or any similarities of space combat fighter tech (the closest thing they seem to have is shuttles).

I know Prowlers could likely cause a lot of trouble with space forces and such since their ECM's and no nullspace bubbles would allow them to stay in a spot and watch enemy forces or even drop forces into areas and leave.

IF the UNSC manages to find the capital city of the Abh. If they use their Slip space tech and manine boarding forces correctly. Especially the prowlers they could likely launch a very moraly damaging strike against the Abh. If the prowlers arive at the system and lie in wait and then use their onboard nukes to make strikes against the defense fleet only to then have a UNSC strike fleet show up and start launching boarding craft into the Obh city to damage as much infrastructure and take any useful intel they can find. Launching such a suprise attack so deep in the lines even it the attack doesn't do much damage it cause cause massive damage to the Abh moral that they may never fully recover from. (their feelings of safety comes from how well their fleets and space forces protects them. A direct attack on their capital that bypasses all their fleets and lands troops inside it would be a rather large shake up since they seem to realy mostly on their space forces and have such confidence in it.

Also I wonder how that one odd female Abh admiral would react to the Range of UNSC ships weapons and resilience to fire. She may say the UNSC mac gun is elegant or something. (I would love to know what's with this odd fixation on what's elegant of not)

But even if War doesn't go off the bat it would be interesting to see if the Abh will try to send a diplomatic onvoy to the UNSC. If anything the Abh and Alliance are going to find some odd things (I wonder how the Alliance will react to the Spartans)

I honestly don't see the USNC doing very well against the Ahb (or even one of the allied nations) as the difference in scale is just too much. Sure slipspace will be a huge advantage in the beginning but it'll only be a matter of time before they get their hands on that technology (probably would only take the capture of one USNC world).

Wow! Slow down there tiger! One I think it would be a BAD IDEA to make this post UNSC/Covenant war. We have has only one book(which I have yet to read.) so far about what happens after the battle of the Ark. But what we do know is that they are beginning to incorporate Forerunner teck into their ships which is a Validtaps award right there.

I honestly don't see the USNC doing very well against the Ahb (or even one of the allied nations) as the difference in scale is just too much. Sure slipspace will be a huge advantage in the beginning but it'll only be a matter of time before they get their hands on that technology (probably would only take the capture of one USNC world).

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I don't know about that. Ahb ship's don't sound like they would last very(or at all) ageist a MAC round. Plus the UNSC is full of a bunch sane, motivated, and competent captains. How big was the Ahb empire? Before the war the UNSC covered most of the Orin arm.

Slipspace would drive the Abh completely nuts. A huge part of their culture is based around their doctrine of controlling access to interstellar transport which is only possible because of the limited nature of FTL travel in that 'verse. Suddenly throwing a means of FTL that bypasses all of that, can be put into what are very small vessels by their standards and allow nigh unlimited freedom of navigation. Well it wouldn't be pretty, even if they would be forced to adopt it with insane speed for fear of losing the race to another power.

I'd have to re-read it to give a complete rundown... But it is basically guys riding elephants with riffles fighting guys riding motorcycles with pistols. Sure, the Abh can spam their ships, but for all their technology, Abh ships are an order of magnitude smaller than UNSC ships.
They do have a fighter analogue however: Patrol ships seem to be on the same scale as Pelicans and Longswords.
I'd guess that Assault ships range the same area as UNSC frigates, but are probably on the small side.
Battle ships seem to be longer, but less massive than UNSC cruisers.

If they ever see a Covenant capitol ship, which are both fucking huge and maneuverable, they would have a brown pants moment.
A UNSC with Covenant level technology, or even the Sangheili, well one capitol ship could murder fleets. Mostly because multiple Banner of the Stars sleets would be needed to equal its mass.

I'd have to re-read it to give a complete rundown... But it is basically guys riding elephants with riffles fighting guys riding motorcycles with pistols. Sure, the Abh can spam their ships, but for all their technology, Abh ships are an order of magnitude smaller than UNSC ships.
They do have a fighter analogue however: Patrol ships seem to be on the same scale as Pelicans and Longswords.
I'd guess that Assault ships range the same area as UNSC frigates, but are probably on the small side.
Battle ships seem to be longer, but less massive than UNSC cruisers.

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Acording to a site www.Abhnation.com patrol ships are the largest warships in the empire (not to mention very slow). I think your talking about the Attack ships.

I'm also confused because the smallest ship class I could find that the Abh has, has a crew complement and engineers to maintain the ship's. Which would mean their are much larger then long swords since those ship have a perminant engineering crew. This would mean that Longswords are noticeably smaller than Attack ships.

I looked up a wiki for quick reference: I saw a cockpit window on a non-abh patrol ship, and abh ships are supposed to be the smallest.

As for an engineer, it has to do with the doctrines in action. A longsword will have an engineer in its mothership, an Abh patrol ship on the other-hand has its own FTL, its more like a torpedo boat than a bomber. It will have a few engineers inside to fix the engines if they go wonky, but isn't that much bigger.

I might be wrong on the naming convention, but the ships that the Abh and their rivals use for the same nitch as UNSC uses it frigates aren't much bigger than UNSC fighters. Much of the extra size also has do go into mounting the FTL and having internal access to it, while this is countered by their advanced technology.

I also want to say that even though those mines are long range weapons their nothing like Archer missles. I found what their armed with and an archer missile travels faster and pack's a much bigger punch than any Abh mines.

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Well, we never get a clear idea of speeds or ranges or anything for the Abh stuff, and I know nothing more about the Halo stuff than what I just looked up on a Wiki, but it's really hard for me to think that any conventional explosive is going to be more powerful than a matter/anti-matter reaction. Judging from the wiki, they're also vulnerable to laser point-defense, which the Abh make extensive use of.
Of course, I'd also assume the UNSC has point defense, so the mines not work that well against them. The Abh are pretty fond of mine spamming, though.

Also does anyone have an opinion about how effective carriers would be against Abh forces since the Abh lack's space fighters or any similarities of space combat fighter tech (the closest thing they seem to have is shuttles).

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We do see one armed yacht that's basically a single-person craft, so they Abh aren't completely ignorant of the idea. They just don't use it for some reason.

Launching such a suprise attack so deep in the lines even it the attack doesn't do much damage it cause cause massive damage to the Abh moral that they may never fully recover from.

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No, you certainly don't understand the Abh mentality. This would not crush their morale, this would turn their entire empire into a murder-kill-destroy machine bent on nothing other than wiping you out. Look up the concept of "Abh Hell".

I should add that at the beginning of the war with the Four Nations Alliance, the alliance made a strike that did almost reach Lakfakale. It was not a morale-busting event.

The Abh, earlier in their history, kept their families on board their warships. They've basically got Proud Warrior Race Guy as an official stage of life, and the higher (social) ranked you are the bigger deal it is. In fact, that's how the Emperor/Empress is selected. The Imperial Admiral, in control of the armed forces, is the crown prince/princess. They remain in that position until another Abriel is promoted to that rank, at which point they become the Emperor, and the former Emperor steps down into an advisory council.

But even if War doesn't go off the bat it would be interesting to see if the Abh will try to send a diplomatic onvoy to the UNSC.

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The Abh are a bit... weird about this kind of thing. I don't think we really get anything in-series to say that they have diplomats elsewhere. One thing they do, though, is foreign ambassadors only actually get to meet the Emperor twice; once when they're appointed, and once when they leave. The rest of the time they only deal with the rest of the government.

I don't know about that. Ahb ship's don't sound like they would last very(or at all) ageist a MAC round. Plus the UNSC is full of a bunch sane, motivated, and competent captains. How big was the Ahb empire? Before the war the UNSC covered most of the Orin arm.

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Not sure about the MAC rounds. They do have railgun weapons, so they're familiar with the concept, they just don't use it for pure kinetic weaponry. It's never really clear why not, but assuming their ship designers aren't complete morons, there's probably some good reason for it.

On ships, here's a basic breakdown. Note the "Line of Battle ships" (I suspect this is a mistranslation given the description), which can be up to 10 miles long. If this is accurate then the Abh are no strangers to really big ships.

Well, we never get a clear idea of speeds or ranges or anything for the Abh stuff, and I know nothing more about the Halo stuff than what I just looked up on a Wiki, but it's really hard for me to think that any conventional explosive is going to be more powerful than a matter/anti-matter reaction. Judging from the wiki, they're also vulnerable to laser point-defense, which the Abh make extensive use of.

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The UNSC missile payload according to the info I found it's not a simple explosive.

First check this site to see the different in Halo between Rail Guns and MAC cammons.

Also the UNSC uses railguns with their turrets so they have several rail gun per ship. Meaning that UNSC ships are designed to take several hits from Railguns. (rounds of about 1 ton in weight) The MAC guns are far larger and more powerful anyway. Due to the shear size of the round (much larger than the railgun's rounds) and it's travel velocity giving it a pay load would actually unneeded your practically firing something that has the kinetic force of many many nuclear explosives.

Next Archer missiles show to have nuclear warning labels on Archer missile pods. Meaning that if Archer missiles don't have a nuclear payload then it's likely that their payload is some for of high energy release one (I found some info showing the payload is essentially a charge of energy that is released like a concentrated forward fireball of plasma on contact.

Coil guns and railguns aren't that different, so I would assume the Abh at least know of them. The specs there are pretty high (especially for the Super MAC), but I'd have to look into what kind of power generation UNSC has to even estimate if their output is feasible.
Still, the UNSC ships do sound like they're much more heavily armored than the Banner ships, so they'd have an advantage there.

Okay, I just did some rough numbers for the power requirements for that Super MAC. Assuming 100% efficiency, it's eating 2x10^22 joules per shot. The wiki claims it can be fired once every 5 seconds by being charged from ground-based power plants. As far as I can tell from the Wiki, the UNSC uses fusion reactors.

Someone didn't do the math when they thought this thing up. Unless those fusion reactors are an appreciable fraction of the size of the sun this isn't working even before you start to consider the inverse square law.

I have no problem giving suspension of disbelief passes for things like FLT travel (since there isn't much of a space opera story without it), or exotic power sources like Zero Point energy. But unless I'm missing some Halo lore, it doesn't look like they're claiming anything of the sort.

I looked up a wiki for quick reference: I saw a cockpit window on a non-abh patrol ship, and abh ships are supposed to be the smallest.

As for an engineer, it has to do with the doctrines in action. A longsword will have an engineer in its mothership, an Abh patrol ship on the other-hand has its own FTL, its more like a torpedo boat than a bomber. It will have a few engineers inside to fix the engines if they go wonky, but isn't that much bigger.

I might be wrong on the naming convention, but the ships that the Abh and their rivals use for the same nitch as UNSC uses it frigates aren't much bigger than UNSC fighters. Much of the extra size also has do go into mounting the FTL and having internal access to it, while this is countered by their advanced technology.

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One the Abh ships don't actually have windows that's an artist artifact. Going by (admittedly not perfect) translations of the first novel they rely entirely on sensors on all their plane-space capable vessels. The displays you see on bridges and such are not windows they're a form of computer generated enhanced reality image.

Two distances between combatants in the anime try to keep in-line with the books but are still compressed in certain scenes to emphasize aspects of the fight. The anime doesn't have reliable range measures and while the novels do in the original language the translation is iffy because they're given in the fictional unit of the Abh then translated twice to reach conventional measurements in English. But I think that even in plane-space where there is significant reduction in range it's still not too much less than Halo naval engagement ranges.

Three as for ship size this is somewhat difficult because the best sources of information are a pair of short publications by the series author that haven't to my knowledge been translated to English and are apparently very hard to find even in Japan as they were only circulated at some sort of con. But we do have some benchmarks, I need to dig the reference out of my files. The Patrol ships are in fact not the largest ships in the Abh fleet, they are more like age of sail frigates. Big enough for long independent operation and not much more, maybe 1/5th the size of the largest Abh warships. The best figure I've seen for size of Abh patrol ships puts them in the range of 1100-1200m. The largest I'm aware of is a fleet combatant that one-ups the Manti-Missile-Massacre, it's roughly 5 times the length of a Patrol Ship (roughly 5km long) and in combat its entire hull splits open like a T to the aft showing that 4/5ths of it's length is a "mine" silo capable of spamming missiles in a way that defies comprehension. Apparently missile spam between engaging fleets is so bad they have entire ship classes devoted purely to an anti-mine function.